Objective
Fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. We investigate the psychological profile of individuals ...who fall prey to fake news.
Method
We recruited 1,606 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for three online surveys.
Results
The tendency to ascribe profundity to randomly generated sentences—pseudo‐profound bullshit receptivity—correlates positively with perceptions of fake news accuracy, and negatively with the ability to differentiate between fake and real news (media truth discernment). Relatedly, individuals who overclaim their level of knowledge also judge fake news to be more accurate. We also extend previous research indicating that analytic thinking correlates negatively with perceived accuracy by showing that this relationship is not moderated by the presence/absence of the headline’s source (which has no effect on accuracy), or by familiarity with the headlines (which correlates positively with perceived accuracy of fake and real news).
Conclusion
Our results suggest that belief in fake news may be driven, to some extent, by a general tendency to be overly accepting of weak claims. This tendency, which we refer to as reflexive open‐mindedness, may be partly responsible for the prevalence of epistemically suspect beliefs writ large.
Macrophages are critical mediators of tissue homeostasis, with tumours distorting this proclivity to stimulate proliferation, angiogenesis and metastasis. This had led to an interest in targeting ...macrophages in cancer, and preclinical studies have demonstrated efficacy across therapeutic modalities and tumour types. Much of the observed efficacy can be traced to the suppressive capacity of macrophages, driven by microenvironmental cues such as hypoxia and fibrosis. As a result, tumour macrophages display an ability to suppress T cell recruitment and function as well as to regulate other aspects of tumour immunity. With the increasing impact of cancer immunotherapy, macrophage targeting is now being evaluated in this context. Here, we discuss the results of clinical trials and the future of combinatorial immunotherapy.
The Psychology of Fake News Pennycook, Gordon; Rand, David G.
Trends in cognitive sciences,
20/May , Letnik:
25, Številka:
5
Journal Article
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We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share false or highly misleading news online. Contrary to a common narrative whereby politics drives susceptibility to fake ...news, people are ‘better’ at discerning truth from falsehood (despite greater overall belief) when evaluating politically concordant news. Instead, poor truth discernment is associated with lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and the use of heuristics such as familiarity. Furthermore, there is a substantial disconnect between what people believe and what they share on social media. This dissociation is largely driven by inattention, more so than by purposeful sharing of misinformation. Thus, interventions can successfully nudge social media users to focus more on accuracy. Crowdsourced veracity ratings can also be leveraged to improve social media ranking algorithms.
Recent evidence contradicts the common narrative that partisanship and politically motivated reasoning explain why people fall for 'fake news'.Poor truth discernment is linked to a lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, as well as to the use of familiarity and source heuristics.There is also a large disconnect between what people believe and what they will share on social media, and this is largely driven by inattention rather than by purposeful sharing of misinformation.Effective interventions can nudge social media users to think about accuracy, and can leverage crowdsourced veracity ratings to improve social media ranking algorithms.
Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does "rational" self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by ...meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic cooperation games (total N = 17,647; no indication of publication bias using Egger's test, Begg's test, or p-curve). My meta-analysis was guided by the social heuristics hypothesis, which proposes that intuition favors behavior that typically maximizes payoffs, whereas deliberation favors behavior that maximizes one's payoff in the current situation. Therefore, this theory predicts that deliberation will undermine pure cooperation (i.e., cooperation in settings where there are few future consequences for one's actions, such that cooperating is not in one's self-interest) but not strategic cooperation (i.e., cooperation in settings where cooperating can maximize one's payoff). As predicted, the meta-analysis revealed 17.3% more pure cooperation when intuition was promoted over deliberation, but no significant difference in strategic cooperation between more intuitive and more deliberative conditions.
•Participants rated perceived accuracy of fake and real news headlines.•Analytic thinking was associated with ability to discern between fake and real.•We found no evidence that analytic thinking ...exacerbates motivated reasoning.•Falling for fake news is more a result of a lack of thinking than partisanship.
Why do people believe blatantly inaccurate news headlines (“fake news”)? Do we use our reasoning abilities to convince ourselves that statements that align with our ideology are true, or does reasoning allow us to effectively differentiate fake from real regardless of political ideology? Here we test these competing accounts in two studies (total N = 3446 Mechanical Turk workers) by using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) as a measure of the propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. We find that CRT performance is negatively correlated with the perceived accuracy of fake news, and positively correlated with the ability to discern fake news from real news – even for headlines that align with individuals’ political ideology. Moreover, overall discernment was actually better for ideologically aligned headlines than for misaligned headlines. Finally, a headline-level analysis finds that CRT is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively implausible (primarily fake) headlines, and positively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively plausible (primarily real) headlines. In contrast, the correlation between CRT and perceived accuracy is unrelated to how closely the headline aligns with the participant’s ideology. Thus, we conclude that analytic thinking is used to assess the plausibility of headlines, regardless of whether the stories are consistent or inconsistent with one’s political ideology. Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se – a finding that opens potential avenues for fighting fake news.
A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries, ...including 109 developing countries, controlling for education and marital and labor force status, among others, on samples of individuals under the age of 70. The U-shape of the curve is forcefully confirmed, with an age minimum, or nadir, in midlife around age 50 in separate analyses for developing and advanced countries as well as for the continent of Africa. The happiness curve seems to be everywhere. While panel data are largely unavailable for this issue, and the findings using such data largely confirm the cross-section results, the paper discusses insights on why cohort effects do not drive the findings. I find the age of the minima has risen over time in Europe and the USA.
Regressions and meta-regressions are widely used to estimate patterns and effect sizes in various disciplines. However, many biological and medical analyses use relatively low sample size (N), ...contributing to concerns on reproducibility. What is the minimum N to identify the most plausible data pattern using regressions? Statistical power analysis is often used to answer that question, but it has its own problems and logically should follow model selection to first identify the most plausible model. Here we make null, simple linear and quadratic data with different variances and effect sizes. We then sample and use information theoretic model selection to evaluate minimum N for regression models. We also evaluate the use of coefficient of determination (R2) for this purpose; it is widely used but not recommended. With very low variance, both false positives and false negatives occurred at N < 8, but data shape was always clearly identified at N ≥ 8. With high variance, accurate inference was stable at N ≥ 25. Those outcomes were consistent at different effect sizes. Akaike Information Criterion weights (AICc wi) were essential to clearly identify patterns (e.g., simple linear vs. null); R2 or adjusted R2 values were not useful. We conclude that a minimum N = 8 is informative given very little variance, but minimum N ≥ 25 is required for more variance. Alternative models are better compared using information theory indices such as AIC but not R2 or adjusted R2. Insufficient N and R2-based model selection apparently contribute to confusion and low reproducibility in various disciplines. To avoid those problems, we recommend that research based on regressions or meta-regressions use N ≥ 25.
Combining evolutionary models with behavioral experiments can generate powerful insights into the evolution of human behavior. The emergence of online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk ...(AMT) allows theorists to conduct behavioral experiments very quickly and cheaply. The process occurs entirely over the computer, and the experience is quite similar to performing a set of computer simulations. Thus AMT opens the world of experimentation to evolutionary theorists. In this paper, I review previous work combining theory and experiments, and I introduce online labor markets as a tool for behavioral experimentation. I review numerous replication studies indicating that AMT data is reliable. I also present two new experiments on the reliability of self-reported demographics. In the first, I use IP address logging to verify AMT subjects' self-reported country of residence, and find that 97% of responses are accurate. In the second, I compare the consistency of a range of demographic variables reported by the same subjects across two different studies, and find between 81% and 98% agreement, depending on the variable. Finally, I discuss limitations of AMT and point out potential pitfalls. I hope this paper will encourage evolutionary modelers to enter the world of experimentation, and help to strengthen the bond between theoretical and empirical analyses of the evolution of human behavior.
What role does deliberation play in susceptibility to political misinformation and "fake news"? The Motivated System 2 Reasoning (MS2R) account posits that deliberation causes people to fall for fake ...news, because reasoning facilitates identity-protective cognition and is therefore used to rationalize content that is consistent with one's political ideology. The classical account of reasoning instead posits that people ineffectively discern between true and false news headlines when they fail to deliberate (and instead rely on intuition). To distinguish between these competing accounts, we investigated the causal effect of reasoning on media truth discernment using a 2-response paradigm. Participants (N = 1,635 Mechanical Turkers) were presented with a series of headlines. For each, they were first asked to give an initial, intuitive response under time pressure and concurrent working memory load. They were then given an opportunity to rethink their response with no constraints, thereby permitting more deliberation. We also compared these responses to a (deliberative) 1-response baseline condition where participants made a single choice with no constraints. Consistent with the classical account, we found that deliberation corrected intuitive mistakes: Participants believed false headlines (but not true headlines) more in initial responses than in either final responses or the unconstrained 1-response baseline. In contrast-and inconsistent with the Motivated System 2 Reasoning account-we found that political polarization was equivalent across responses. Our data suggest that, in the context of fake news, deliberation facilitates accurate belief formation and not partisan bias.
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